The following is a synopsis of an article by Kathryn Joyce from thenation.com:
Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they’re building for God.
Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–“Father knows best”–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy.
Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands.
“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice” - “My body is not my own”
“Feminism is a religion in its own right, one that is inherently incompatible with Christianity.”
“Family planning,” “is the mother of abortion.”
Instead of picketing clinics, Pride writes, Christians should fight abortion by demonstrating that children are an “unqualified blessing” by having as many as God gives them. Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a “military air” and become “maternal missionaries” will lead the Christian army to victory.
Quiverfull’s militaristic language, which describes children as weapons of spiritual war, as arrows shot out by their parents. But she describes the movement toward larger families in the same way: “God is bringing revelation on the world. He wants to raise up His army. He wants His children to be.”
Raising a large family, she replied, was itself her “battle station,” as deliberately political an act as canvassing for conservative candidates, not to mention part of a long-term plan to win the culture war “demographically.”
“Some people think that what I’m doing–having eleven children–is wrong. I don’t really get into that much. The Bible says ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ That’s my belief system.
Pundits warning of a coming "demographic divide,” wherein fecund red staters will far outnumber barren blue state liberals, are further ratcheting up interest in fertility politics.
Mary Pride puts it in biblical terms–feminism made wage slaves out of women who had once been slaves to God; it made “unpaid prostitutes” out of women who should have been godly mothers and wives.
Husband Christopher and their pastor was urging vasectomy, Christopher saw a warrior angel in his dream. A “large, worrying warrior angel” with a flaming sword that he pointed at Christopher’s genitals, telling him, “Do not change God’s plan.”
“If you don’t invoke God’s word, then there’s really no reason,” the Wolfsons explained. “Kids are great and all that, but in reality, it’s all about the Bible.”
“When at the height of the Reagan Revolution,” they write, “the conservative faction in Washington was enforced [sic] with squads of new conservative congressmen, legislators often found themselves handcuffed by lack of like-minded staff. There simply weren’t enough conservatives trained to serve in Washington in the lower and middle capacities.” But if just 8 million American Christian couples began supplying more “arrows for the war” by having six children or more, they propose, the Christian-right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century (“assuming Christ does not return before then”). They like to ponder the spiritual victory that such numbers could bring: both houses of Congress and the majority of state governor’s mansions filled by Christians; universities that embrace creationism; sinful cities reclaimed for the faithful; and the swift blows dealt to companies that offend Christian sensibilities.
'But the sons of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly, and multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty, so that the land was filled with them.’“ "Brethren,” they write, “it’s time for a comeback!”
The military-industrial terminology they assign to biblical gender roles within such “cells”: the husband described as company CEO, the wife as plant manager and the children as workers. Or, in alternate form, the titles revised to reflect the Christian church’s “constant state of war” with the world: “Commander in Chief” Jesus, the husband a “commanding officer” and his wife a “private” below him. And the kids? Presumably ammunition, arrows, weapons for the war.
Thus patriarchy, and its requirement that wives submit to their husbands, becomes a mission in itself, the inversion of a reactionary movement into a seeming revolution against modern society.
“God can use your Quiverfull to bring up his army of belief.” As a believer and a loving mother, perhaps she sees this path–worldwide redemption through spiritual and actual warfare–as the one that will lead to the end of wars, even if that path means the wars will be fought with arrows such as her son.
See full article:
http://www.thenation.com/article/arrows-war?page=0,0
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